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A couple of “lady boys” were working on the cutting room floor at the Daughters of Cambodia’s operations centre in the middle of a district well-known for its brothels, pimps and drug dealers.

A few more were in the woodworking shop, cutting buttons from coconut shells and making wooden plaques.

The 10 boys in the program aren’t that easy to spot among the other “daughters” — young women and girls who were once commercially sexually exploited and are now getting counselling and retraining so they can move on to a better life.

Elliott would like to do more to help the boys. But for now, the Oxford-trained psychologist says they’re still learning how best to help them because their needs are so different from those of the girls.

Boys are largely forgotten or ignored in the sex tourism narrative. Everybody talks about the exploited girls. It’s their images you see on the posters and ads for charitable donations.

So little research has been done on sexually exploited boys worldwide that estimates of its prevalence vary wildly.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime doesn’t have any estimates for victims of commercial sexual exploitation, only for human trafficking, which is closely related. It estimates that two-thirds of the victims of human traffickers are women, 13 per cent are girls, nine per cent are boys and the remainder are men.

But recent research here as well as in Ethiopia, Brazil, Peru, India and other sex-tourism hot spots indicates that boys are as likely as girls to be victimized by travelling sexual predators. Some research even suggests that boys are more likely to be exploited.

Elliott and many others working for non-governmental organizations here are particularly concerned about the explosion of the commercial sex trade in Sihanoukville that seems to involve many more boys than girls.

Sihanoukville is Cambodia’s premier beach resort and is rapidly being re-developed to attract tourists with new guest houses aimed at budget travellers and spectacular, luxury hotels on outlying islands. It’s happening just as Thailand is curbing its sex tourism industry.

Given that, a Western diplomatic source said, it’s no surprise there is a concerted lobby to have direct air connections to Sihanoukville not only from Phnom Penh and Cambodia’s other major tourist attraction — the Angkor temples in Siem Reap — but also from Russia.

Boys account for 55 to 60 per cent of the victims rescued by the French-based Action Pour Les Enfants, according to its director Seila Samleang. APLE investigates and helps prosecute child sex offenders.

Once the boys are rescued, Samleang says there are fewer shelters and fewer services. But he says, “Generally boys choose not to go to receive counselling or whatever.

“We offer to send them to after-care programs, but they refuse. They think that what they were doing isn’t harmful. They think it’s the quickest way to get money.”

There’s a certain logic to that. Most workers in Cambodia earn about $1 a day, while boys who have sex with men can earn anywhere from $10 to $50 a day.

Dozens — if not hundreds — of the estimated 3,200 non-governmental organizations here have programs to rescue, protect, counsel, empower, educate, train and reintegrate girls and young women back to their communities. But until three years ago, about the only programs for boys and young men were related to HIV/AIDS.

*

American Michael Munson first came to Cambodia in 2009 as a volunteer at the Agape Mission’s kids’ camp in notorious Svay Pak. But he got a job with another U.S.-based group called Hard Places working with street kids who hang out along Phnom Penh’s riverfront.

Munson, along with Glenn Miles (who works for another NGO called Love146), recently completed a research project that involved interviewing 45 boys working in six different massage parlours.

“Boys are being sold as much as girls are and foreigners are the majority of the buyers,” says Munson.

Both Munson and others say the boys’ plight is largely ignored here because of long-held gender stereotypes as well as a social taboo against discussing homosexuality.

There’s a Cambodian saying that sums it up: Boys are like gold. Girls are like white cloth. If boys fall in the mud, it can easily be washed off. If girls do, the stain remains. The belief reflected in the proverb is that if boys do anything wrong, they face no lasting consequences — social or emotional.

It’s not much different in the West, says Miles, co-author of the recent study with Munson and another of boys in the sex trade in India.

Miles says Western perceptions of girls and boys are reflected in two Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin. Sleeping Beauty needs to be rescued, while Aladdin is a street kid, smart, self-sufficient, who’s even envied by men because of his freedom.

“The message is that girls are vulnerable and not resilient and boys are all resilience with no vulnerability. Both are false and unhelpful,” Miles says.

“It’s not a good picture for the girls because you can build resilience in them, they can have a voice ... For boys, it’s also not good. They are not resilient. They are completely vulnerable as well.”

What results, he says, is that child-centred NGOs — many of which are faith-based — are often “blinkered.”

Yet, it’s mostly Christian organizations that pay for the little research and programs available.

Vancouver-based Ratanak International helps fund a boys’ program run by Hagar, an Australian-based NGO that started out working only with girls. Ratanak also gives money to a small pilot project for transsexuals — “lady boys” — that’s run by British-based Daughters of Cambodia.

“Some of our boys are as badly off or worse off than the girls because of the degradation that they’ve suffered at the hands of perverted pedophiles, especially the lady boys [transsexuals]. At Hagar, we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of boys in the last few years.”

*

The first research on sexually abused and exploited boys was done in 2008 for Hagar and the Cambodian government, with funds provided by World Vision Canada and its Cambodia office. It was aptly titled: I Thought It Could Never Happen to Boys.

Lead researcher Alastair Hilton noted that because boys’ experiences are so different from girls, prevention, protection, rescue, treatment and training programs for them must also be different.

Most boys aren’t trafficked or sold into a large brothel or massage parlour. Instead, many look for male partners on their own out of economic necessity, often after having run away from an abusive, violent home.

Unlike the girls, they rarely know others with shared experiences and their intense shame isolates them.

Research indicates that most sexually exploited boys do not identify themselves as homosexual, even though their abusers are almost exclusively men.

However, some are conflicted about their sexuality, particularly if they were sexually exploited before they reached puberty, if they were forced to dress like girls or if they are transsexual.

Unlike some parts of Asia such as Thailand and India where transsexuals — “lady boys” or “hijiras” — are better tolerated, if not accepted, here they are complete outcasts, despised, taunted and persecuted by society and even their own families.

“Our boys, their families want them to be ‘normal,’ ” says Elliott. “Some of the boys attribute it to having been sexually abused. But they choose to become lady boys in most cases.”

Her biggest concern is that they had to be promiscuous and exhibitionist to survive and, because of this, more likely to slide back into sex work, particularly the growing ‘entertainment business’ that includes transsexual shows and pornography.

Elliott hopes to have enough money in her budget this year to rent a house where the boys can stay together until they’re strong enough to make good choices. She’s also considering creating a centre for other sexually exploited boys. It would be called, of course, Sons of Cambodia.

*

Over at Hagar, counsellors are also struggling to find out how best to help the boys.

While rescued girls feel safest in larger, residential centres, Taylor says boys don’t like being confined. They are also more likely to be violent and to act out sexually as they replay their trauma, which can make residential centres less effective.

As Miles puts it, “Girls are more culturally compliant. With the boys, it’s like trying to hold jelly fish.”

American-based Hard Places has plans for a large residential trauma centre. In September 2011, it secured a four-storey building close to Phnom Penh’s popular riverfront area where men frequently proposition street boys.

While it waits for government approval, Hard Places offers day programs, including daily English classes that attract anywhere from 25 to 70 boys, ranging in age from four to 15.

Not all the boys have been commercially sexually exploited, says Munson. But some have.

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Part Four: Boys the forgotten victims (with video)

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